Today the tour started in earnest. Everybody onto the tourist bus.
As expected for a tour like this, ages ranged from late 40s to mid 70s, with a lot of retirees.
First stop: Tiananmen Square.
Lyn was always an attraction, particularly when the sun was catching the colours in her hair.
Me - just another foreigner.
There were some special floral constructions - garden models of the great wall. Seemed designed to invite hoards of foreigners in rather than keep them out.
Next stop: Out the back of the square to The Forbidden City
Their designers and builders knew how to do defenses, how to create vast open spaces for assembling thousands of soldiers,
how to make ornate eves using the same pattern over and over, and how to guard their buildings with little figurines to ward off the spirits (and tell the commoners how special the house owner was),
how to make big
chamber water pots in case of fire,
how to make awesome dragon turtle statues, but...
really...
garden design?
Let's just take these wobbly eroded rocks that someone dredged up from the bottom of a river and make them a garden feature. Yeah, that'd be really cool!
Final stop for the day: The Red Theatre.
It's a story about a boy delivered to a monastery and turned into a Kung Fu master. That sounds really cool until you think about it in terms of the current investigations into abuse within religious schools.
Good performance, though. Some interesting percussion.
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